What You Should Know About David Chang of Momofuku

It’s hard to believe that this August will mark 10 years since David Chang opened his first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, in New York’s East Village. That place, whose optimized versions of ramen and pork buns electrified the burgeoning food blogosphere of the mid-aughts, has since begotten nine further New York City establishments (if you count his fast-proliferating Milk Bar dessert shops), five more Chang-branded places in Toronto, and a restaurant in Sydney, not to mention a Wonka-esque culinary lab in Brooklyn. Chang is also a guiding force behind Lucky Peach, a gorgeous, high-production-value literary food quarterly published under the aegis of Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s imprint. Chang impressed himself upon the food world as a profane, gonzo, emotionally volatile enfant terrible. But now, at the age of 36, he is après-enfant and pas si terrible, a dialed-down and more reflective man—if still as complicated and self-flagellatory as ever. Herewith, some data gleaned from an early afternoon’s worth of Chang time.

HE IS the Virginia-raised son of Korean immigrants—educated in Vienna, a suburb of Washington, D.C., but well acquainted with Richmond, where his father had a business. Culinarily, this background has come to bear on such Chang creations as his Honeycrisp-apple kimchi with jowl bacon and Noodle Bar’s fried chicken served two ways, southern-style and Korean-style.

HIS QUASI-SOUTHERNNESS further surfaces via an abiding love of the Allman Brothers and a lingering if no longer wholly felt sentiment, inculcated in him in his schoolboy days, that Robert E. Lee was “the coolest guy of all time.”

HIS FAVORITE Allman Brothers album is Eat a Peach. One translation of the word momofuku is “lucky peach.”

HE IS a David by billing, but a Dave in everyday practice.

HE HATES the taste of dill.

HE IS not fond of offal, which, he sheepishly admits, puts him out of step with the prevailing offal-chic hegemony.

HE IS currently consumed by the idea of expanding the parameters of what soy sauce and miso paste can be, working in his culinary lab to produce new, soy-less interpretations of these fermented foodstuffs—which he has named, respectively, “bonji” and “hozon.” His team has developed bonjis made from farro and smoked spelt, and hozons made from lentils and chickpeas.

HIS ACHIEVEMENTS notwithstanding, he is constantly haunted by feelings that he is out of his depth, even in the kitchen. He ascribes this to han, a uniquely Korean form of angst that manifests itself as both a resigned acceptance that life is difficult and a grim determination to struggle through this difficulty.

HE IS especially troubled by his meteoric rise to fame as it compares with the relative obscurity in which one of his idols, Alex Lee, formerly the executive chef at Daniel, continues to work.

HE IS soothed more by mountains than by beaches. He is particularly taken with the Tetons, in Wyoming.

HE DOES not drink coffee and leans on no other stimulant, being inherently, in his own words, “a pretty fucking hyper dude.”

HE LONG ago forsook golf, a sport his father foisted upon him as a child, yet he retains an admiration for Bruce Lietzke, an 80s-era pro golfer who was notable for playing a very light schedule of tournaments. “I guess he was the type of person I wish I could be,” says Chang. “Naturally gifted, but always aiming for the middle.”

HE IS often inspired by sports figures, particularly those who succeed against the odds, such as the Seattle Seahawks’ Russell Wilson, who was thought to be too short to be a Super Bowl-caliber quarterback.

HE WISHES he could embrace his eclectic C.V. with the brio with which Shaquille O’Neal has embraced his, “from the Reebok pumps to the Shaq Fu video game to the awful movies and rap albums. I appreciate people who are happy.”

HIS FAVORITE book is the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s ranty, nihilistically comic novel Old Masters, which, though it concerns two men talking in an art museum, Chang likes to interpret as an allegorical commentary on the culinary world.